Volume 6 : 2 February 2006

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Contributors from South Asia may send their articles toB. Mallikarjun, Central Institute of Indian Languages, Manasagangotri, Mysore 570006, India or e-mail to mallikarjun@ciil.stpmy.soft.net

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LANGUAGE VIEWED CLINICALLYRanjit Singh Rangila

This writing is primarily concerned with those human bodies that do not develop
a natural ability to produce sounds that may be identified as speech sounds.

The vocalization that these human beings may sometimes produce could
participate in some kind of vague expression creation that is more of an attempt at
gesture making.

That is, even though in certain cases there could be some vocalic ability to
produce unites of some character, they are never the discrete sounds that make a
given language.

These human beings are, therefore, not language producing bodies. Rather, they
are the bodies that may be waiting for assistance so that they could be put on their
journey to language.

Language in such cases is a point to be reached, and not a state of ability. They
reach this ability only after they travel through an aided journey of gaining sounds
that make language.

The expression language clinically in the title, when translated into an inquiry,
therefore, reads as this question: How does a needy body travel during journey to
gain language with the help of clinical intervention?

CLINICAL NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

As a mater of investigative focus this writing proposes to investigate what may be called
the clinicality problem.

This problem has a very mega spread and it unfolds in multiple directions.
Therefore, the first job here is to workout some picture of the problem so that it is clear as
to what exactly could be the focus of the investigation that the writing undertakes.
There is, for instance, a condition of soundlessness due to the non-development of sound
producing ability – the concern of the writing expressed above.

Then there is a condition of ill-formedness. That is, an individual has some version of
sound producing ability, but the sounds as such lack proper formation. Even if the
vocalization is somehow identifiable as some kind of sounds, they do not make to the
language grade clarity. In majority of the cases the sounds within this condition lackdiscreteness – one of the basic properties of speech sounds that participate in language
formation.

There is also a condition of accidental loss in which human beings with normal and
established ability to well produce sounds lose the ability due to some injury or some
such external-internal cause (see Jakobson 1971ed).

All these better observable conditions of soundlessness are somehow also linked with the
ones that are not directly and easily locatable, though they cause sound impairments.
In accordance with an observational facility developed in a previous writing (see Rangila
2002) all these problem-making conditions can be lifted up from their individual spheres
of reality and generality up to a more wide, call it meta and para conditions of
clinicality.

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